


a hole in your chest that's been dug there for decades

by Cirkne



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-It, Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 18:31:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20821895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cirkne/pseuds/Cirkne
Summary: Stanley and Richie deal with the possibility of losing Eddie





	a hole in your chest that's been dug there for decades

**Author's Note:**

> this is for jessie who was promised stozier fluff to combat her stozier angst and got this mess instead, im sorry but i love you
> 
> title from cardinals by the wonder years

After everything, after they’ve dragged Eddie out of the Neibolt house, after they’ve washed their hands and faces in a hospital bathroom, Stanley follows Richie outside. Though the fog has not yet fully lifted, he remembers this part. How silent Richie gets, how angry, how he keeps cleaning his glasses. To have something to do with his hands or because he feels dirty, Stanley doesn’t know. They’re outside. Richie’s body, in the light coming from the hospital, is shaking. Stanley can no longer make out his face. He thinks if he could, it would kill him. He says:

“Richie,” and doesn’t expect him to listen. He saw it happen. “Richie,” he repeats. “It wasn’t your fault.” But Richie’s stubborn, of course, he’s afraid. He thinks he’s lost Eddie again and nothing will matter if he has, nothing could ever matter. 

Stanley sits down on the hospital stairs though they’re wet. It was raining and none of them noticed. It was raining and they were holding Eddie, his blood dripping down their hands. It registers that these are new jeans, that he dressed up for them, that he went into the sewers dressed nicely because he wanted to make an impression. He wanted to say _look, I can afford stuff like this now_ and none of them cared. They’ve seen him covered in worse things than blood. 

“Richie,” he tries again and again. “He isn’t going to die,” he doesn’t know that. He’s never lied to Richie before. “He can’t die,” they’ll fall apart, fall apart, they’re nearly there. Richie has not stopped pacing.

“I was-” Richie tries, his voice sounds wrong. He hadn’t stopped sobbing. Eddie asked him to, Eddie held his face in his hands and told him to quit it and Richie hadn’t stobbed sobbing, like he had never done it before, like something had broken, inside him, like this sorrow was all he had left.

“I know,” Stanley tells him. Because he does, because he’s always known. It’s always been Richie and Eddie, he saw it carved into the kissing bridge, he didn’t ask why his name wasn’t there with them like it should have been. He didn’t ask and now-

And now it’s twenty-seven years later and he’s wearing his most expensive clothes and he can’t feel his hands or make out the face of his best friend in the dark.

“I was, too,” he says because there’s nothing left to say, because he shares this pain, because it’s just them two now and he’s afraid it will stay that way. 

“Why didn’t you fucking say anything?” there’s still so much fight in him, there’s so much grief, already, they were ruined from the very beginning. The happy ending’s an illusion, they’ll always have this suffering.

“Why didn’t you?” he asks right back, he matches the anger as best as he can. They’re both at fault, they’re both cowards, they both didn’t want to come back. Now, look at them. Mourning a death that has yet to happen, too afraid to go back there, to see his unconscious body.

_I am holding the man you have loved your entire life,_ the universe is saying _and I may never give him back._ He has not prayed in many years. He whispers:

“Please,” like he could ever change anything. He stretches his hand out for Richie to take and waits an eternity before he does. Back then, when they were falling apart, it had been Richie and Stanley, together, still. Richie sits down next to him. His hand is cold. “I was in love with you too, you know,” he says because-

because he says it, because it makes no difference anymore. Richie squeezes his hand. He knows, now. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. They will never be the same. They were never kids and they will never be happy again.

Mike finds them. Mike’s built a life on finding them. Mike watches them sleep in emergency room chairs. Mike drives them to a hotel. Mike’s overprepared for this. He knows exactly what to do. He forces them to eat. He talks and then he says nothing. It takes three days. It rains excessively. Eddie asks for them when he wakes up.

“You look like shit,” Richie laughs because he can, now, because he’s wrong. Because Eddie has never looked this beautiful before. Alive, alive, bandaged up and tired, obviously, smiling. 

“So do you,” Eddie goes. He’s right. They both do. All of them, yes, but Stanley and Richie worse than the others. Eddie’s eyes dance from Richie’s face to Stanley’s like he knows exactly what this means, what they failed to tell him twenty-seven years ago, what they kept telling him in the car after he had already passed out.

“We love you,” Stanley tells him, he feels he has something to prove. It’s an apology for being late, for laying in his bath for two hours before he worked up the courage to see them again. For never carving his name on the kissing bridge like he wanted to, for never bringing either of them there. 

“I almost died for you,” Eddie says like he’s one-upping them, like this is funny, like there’s a world in which their feelings for each other are not evenly matched. “And I’d kiss you if I wasn’t bedridden right now,” oh what a wonderful thought, Stanley thinks, but Richie has always been quicker. His hand on Eddie’s cheek, their lips pressed together, so gentle in the haste of things, so unlike them. 

They reach for him, after, they make him kiss them, they make him sit on the edge of Eddie’s hospital bed and hold his hand. Eddie’s lips are chapped and he hisses in pain when they touch him wrong and he’s never been this wonderful before. He’s everywhere, he’s in their hair, he’s under their skin, he’s made home in their chests, he’s built a life in their veins, he is so fucking beautiful. Love like this exists only for them. It is infinite and it is solid, finally, _finally_, they have earned this.


End file.
